On Tue, 20 May 1997, Jeffrey Smith wrote:

> And all these
> diseases of civilization are the sort that don't appear until the latter
> half of the lifespan, in most cases.  In short, paleoman may not have had
> diabetes, cancer, etc. not because of diet, but because he didn't live
> long enough to develop such a disease....

But keep two points in mind.  First, the virtues of the
hunter/gatherer diet are not based exclusively on paleontological
evidence.  There is also the evidence of recent and contemporary
h/g people.  Second, the fact that the average life expectancy
for paleolithic people was about 30 doesn't entail that there
weren't plenty of people who lived longer than that.  It just
means that *lots* of them didn't live so long, for lots of
reasons.

Todd Moody
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